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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MacNara" data-source="post: 1765791" data-attributes="member: 23290">Well, thanks. I've learned a lot, as I keep repeating. I hope that I'll say it less in future, because some of it will have stuck.Sean, I think you will understand this:I sometimes think of joining the Japan Wild Bird Society where I could get a lot of more detailed information. As I said, I have met the local chief who encouraged me to do so. However, I really can't afford to spend more time on birds than I already do. So, if I joined, I would decline meetings and trips, and appear very stand-offish, doubly-so as a foreigner. In addition, Japanese tend to be very focused and often not in a good sense, by which I mean they have one hobby, and that is their only interest outside work (in which they are often not interested, despite their devotion), and sometimes (I stress 'sometimes' in the case of males) their family.At school, they join one club, and that's it. When I say that at school, I was in the team for rugby, cross-country, and athletics, and in house (internal) teams for basketball, water polo, badminton and squash, Japanese say, 'But how could you split yourself across so many clubs? What about the nightly meetings? How could you be in so many places at once?'So while they can be very interesting on their one 'thing', they are often very boring on everything else. And the same applies to work, as well as hobbies. I have worked with professors of English literature who know all the facts there are to know about 'their' author, even sometimes just one work, and nothing whatsoever about the rest of English literature, let alone having taken the trouble to learn French or Latin or something else which would broaden their outlook on English.All of this applies much more to Japanese men than women but, as we know, birders are overwhelmingly male.I have been lucky in marrying a Japanese woman who defeats the stereotype and is interested in a huge range of things. But I really don't think I would be a good member of WBSJ, or that it would bring me much joy on a personal level, even though I would like to have access to their publications. I might eventually join just for these, and decline the other stuff, but I haven't got there yet.</blockquote>

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